Video streaming is the preference of most people nowadays, but it doesn’t always work for everyone. Some people still have slow or unreliable connections that make streaming an ordeal or completely impossible. Some may want to keep expiring content for later viewing. Screen capture doesn’t work for this if you also have the first problem. There are reasons why downloading may still be the best or only choice.

Many streaming sites do not like downloaders and they do what they can to prevent it. There are numerous software solutions that try to get around the obstacles. Many cost money and don’t work well, or don’t work at all, and are little more than scams. Some require a good deal of technical expertise. A very few actually do what they promise. Like the best things in life, these are free.

I like public broadcasting and I have made a point of searching for the best and easiest downloaders for this content. A spin-off is that they also work with a wide range of other sites. The best way to find out which ones is just to try them. Here is my pick of the best and easiest to use downloaders at this moment:

iViewRipper: This only works for ABC iView but it works very well. When you click to update the database, you get an alphabetical list of all current videos on the site after a few moments. You can then click to download the one you want in MP4 format. I use this with my browser to identify the videos I want before choosing them from the database.

Any Video Converter: Look for the free one. It is brilliant at format conversion but the URL button also works as a downloader. The number of output formats is a little overwhelming, but for ordinary playable videos the best choice is probably customised MP4. It is what I usually use unless I am extracting MP3 audio. This one works with many sites, such as YouTube, but I now use it especially for BBC iPlayer. The iPlayer app only allows downloading of crippled video. For a long time I used IDM, a commercial product, to download high quality videos with no restrictions on them. It worked perfectly until recently, when BBC made some changes that blocked it. Although Any Video Converter does a perfect job of downloading the highest quality videos from iPlayer, it is very slow, presumably because of the iPlayer changes, and downloads take at least as long as playing the stream in real time. Unlike VLC, though, the video does not seem to be streamed, but downloads in tiny 8-second chunks that get reassembled at the end. It is slow compared to most downloads, but the result is a perfect copy.

Bigasoft Video Downloader: The Bigasoft site has many products but the free video downloader is the one you want. This works with a lot of sites but I like it because it works well with Australian SBS. Again, I use my browser to find the video I want and then copy the URL to Bigasoft. The free version limits you to 5 downloads a day and keeps popping up annoying upgrade notices but it is still well worthwhile.

There are a few other good programs that do the same things, but these are the best I have found. I often use them when I want to archive or watch something that won’t stream well. Any Video Converter and Bigasoft almost certainly work with many sites I haven’t tried yet. They may not work everywhere, but they work in places where IDM doesn’t, and that is the only downloader I have ever actually paid for.